Samifati's musical travel diary
Discussion with Sami and Alex from Samifati
Samifati is the bridge between traditional and electronic music. The band from Nantes travel the world in search of sounds, atmospheres, voices and authentic, exotic environments, then deliver an immersive universe on stage. What makes this duo so special is the combination of music and video. Video is no longer an accessory to the story, but an instrument in its own right, just like the violin.
When we were asked to organise an event in Nantes to celebrate our association with Wings of the Ocean, Valentin immediately thought of the duo he had discovered a few years earlier. As well as acting as DJs to close the evening, they were with us all day. It was an opportunity to talk about their career, their work, the environment and their future projects.
Can you introduce yourself in a few words?
Sami / I'm a violinist and electronic musician, and I'm in charge of all the music for the Samifati project. Axel and I are very inspired by our travels. Even before we started travelling, we used to buy traditional music vinyls that we sampled, recycled and cut up all over the place. Then we had the chance to travel and tour and we thought we'd rather go and work directly with the musicians who play this music.
Axel / I'm a video artist and I look after all the visual aspects of the project. The special thing is that I do the video directly on stage. I'm also very influenced by the colours and patterns we find on our travels.
"Our music is a mixture of traditional and electronic music, with violin."
How did you meet?
Axel / We met at a festival I was organising with some friends just over 10 years ago. Sami had a camera in his hands and I asked him if he'd be interested in coming and filming some concerts with me. We met up again the following week, I was filming another festival, he was playing with his band, and I ended up making a video for his band. When his band split up, we started working together and wham!
Sami / We must have met in 2011, and we started doing a project together in 2013. We'd started working together a bit before that, we were doing work experience with the same association that organised events in Nantes, so we often bumped into each other.
We met at a festival just over 10 years ago, which I was organising with some friends. Sami had a camera in his hands and I asked him if he'd be interested in coming and filming some concerts with me.
C'est quoi votre formation ?
Axel / I went to film school in Nantes.
Sami / I went to business school and then did a Masters specialising in culture. I did all my work placements at festivals. At business school they didn't really understand what I had in mind. I don't think I really knew what I wanted to do when I left school, whether I wanted to devote myself to music or not. It was more or less the safest solution, to find an education that was a bit broad but in which I could combine my passions. I then did a two-year Masters in cultural production.
What about the violin?
Sami / I started playing the violin when I was very young, at the age of 6. I went to the conservatoire in Lorient, where I studied classical music at first, until I became a teenager, when I started playing jazz and blues. I also discovered traditional music via the violin, music from Eastern Europe, gypsy music, Irish music, Indian music. 10 years later, we started the project together with Axel, who'd drawn on all that as well.
Can you tell us about your latest project?
Axel / The last project we finished was an album that came out in 2021. When Covid came along, we all found ourselves a bit confined to our own sides, so we weren't able to travel much and do what we were used to doing. So we decided to dive back into the hard drive, to exploit the material we had accumulated over 6-7 years of travelling. Following this archaeological dig, we released an album and a new live album that toured for 2 years.
Sami / It was also an opportunity to get back in touch with all the people we'd met over the years. We wanted to talk to them about our archives and see if they'd agree. We're glad to have got it out of our hard drives. Each time we met people, it was above all to invite them on stage, a meeting of the moment, but afterwards we never played that music again.
How did you come to mix the violin with traditional music?
Sami / It comes from our influences, it came quite naturally. Our parents both made us listen to traditional music. My father is Moroccan, so I've been immersed in North African music and a bit of Middle Eastern music too. It's part of me and I think it's part of Axel too.
Axel / Eastern European music, always with a bit of violin in there somewhere.
Sami / Actually, it's not really intellectualised. I used to make computer music and play the violin at the same time, but I'd never thought of combining the two. When we started working together, I had some traditional music on vinyl and I said to myself "I'm going to sample that". It was intuitive, I had it at my fingertips. Mixing the two is just an evolution of our respective musical upbringings.
And what about video?
Axel / I started messing around even before the project, with archive images, and very quickly I was having fun mixing lots of materials. I made my own little lives out of materials. I started making music videos at a young age, for bands and skateboarders.
When we started working together, I had some traditional music vinyls and I thought "I'll sample that". It was intuitive, I had it at my fingertips. Mixing the two is just an evolution of our respective musical upbringings.
What is your relationship with the environment and pollution?
Sami / We try to be careful about it and it's a problem we can't ignore. Even if we travel to do tours, we try to make sure that we don't travel for one-shots. It doesn't happen much any more. In our development, we have to meet artists and therefore travel by plane, but it's a bit reluctantly. We're trying to find as many alternatives as we can and also to be careful in our day-to-day life in Nantes. In our travels we've noticed that pollution is a problem everywhere. It's less visible in the streets of France.
There are certain geographical areas where the issue of pollution takes on a completely different importance from here, as it is so visible and sometimes disproportionate. How have you experienced this in your travels?
Sami / In our travels we've seen that pollution is a problem everywhere. It's less visible in France, but in other countries it's not the priority, and that's understandable because there are other problems to deal with first. You also have to take into account the geopolitics of each country, because every situation is different. In several places where we have toured, plastic has been found in the sea. We also see the excesses of mass tourism in particular. Sometimes it's also due to the fact that we displace the problem, we send our waste to the other side of the world and forget about it.
It's less visible in the streets of France, but in other countries it's not the priority, and that's understandable because there are other problems to deal with first. You also have to take into account the geopolitics of each country, every situation is different.
Do you have any anecdotes that have particularly struck you?
Sami / In Benin we saw an open-air rubbish dump made up of a mountain of shoes. We created a piece with two Beninese artists, who took us to this place when we were walking around the neighbourhood. We stood on it. These are shoes that have been donated to Relay points, then sent to other countries to be cleaned, sometimes put back on the market, sometimes not. In this case, it was a whole mountain of mismatched shoes, then sorted by people to find the pairs, by colour, by pile. The quantity is truly impressive. There must be hundreds of places like this, especially with clothes.
Any upcoming projects you'd like to tell us about?
Sami / Last June we went to Morocco for a residency. With Moroccan artists who play Gnawa music, which is a form of trance music inherited from the slaves of West Africa. It's a mixture of music from this region and music from North Africa. We'd been thinking for a long time about playing with artists who played this music, and it came about as part of the Essaouïa Gnawa Festival.
We did a 15-day residency with 3 musicians with the ultimate aim of putting on a concert. We met them when we got there and we'd never made music with them before, so even though we'd been in touch beforehand, things went really well. Unlike other creations we've done in the past, the idea is really to push this formula to 5 on stage and to do residencies with them again in Morocco and France.
There's no reason why we should be the only ones inspired by their culture and the way they play it. What would be really interesting is for them to come to France and for us to take them to a club to listen to techno until noon at a festival, to push the fusion between our two worlds. We don't know where things are going to go yet, but we'll see in 2024 how the project evolves, maybe with a record.
